Trinity by Leon Uris

Taylor’s staff pick:
The book is the story of the intertwining lives of the Larkins, Catholic hill farmers from the fictional town of Ballyutogue in County Donegal, the Macleods, Protestant shipyard workers from Belfast, and the Hubbles, representatives of three centuries of Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

It also tells the story of Ireland from the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s to the Easter Rising of 1916. The book describes a number of true events, including the Gaelic Revival of Irish culture in the early twentieth century, and the Curragh Mutiny, in which a British division’s officer corps resigned en masse rather than obey an order to disarm gun-smuggling members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. In addition, the book foreshadows the partition of Ireland following the Irish Civil War.

The book further portrays the British and Protestant elite’s manipulation of religious and ethnic divides to further their own ends as well as deepen the animosity between Catholics and Protestants.

In the first part of Trinity, the reader it witness to the death of Kilty Larkin. The father of Tomas and grandfather of Conor. Amidst all of the kerfuffle of the wake (the ancient irish/catholic mourning process) Conor has a vision of the town storyteller, and through out the next few chapters, this storyteller, who is still alive so is not appearing as a ghost, tells Conor of the history of the Fenians. A rebel group from the early 19th century.

The novel Trinity goes into great detail chronicling the lives of the Hubbles, Conor Larkin, his best friend Seamus O’Neill, and all those who get involved with them. However the one recurring motif through out the text, is the father son relationship.

This same motif appears with one of the other main families, the Hubbles. There are issues between Lord Roger and his father, Arthur, which is why Roger takes over the reigns of the family. In addition to that, one of Roger’s sons, Jeremy Hubble, refuses to comply with his fathers wishes to distance himself from his girlfriend. Even as Conor lays dying at the feet of a British soldier, he cries out, “Daddy…Daddy!”

A sequel, Redemption, completes many loose ends in the saga.